Gatillos

Well it's really taking me a while to draw the next page. All the drafts and dialogue are finished, it's just a matter of... well... drawing :).

Here's a sneak peek of what's to come. Oh the mystery.

I want to create two comics, one is LIFE/interior and the other is so far called '3-panel comic'. The first one should receive weekly updates, while the second will be more random.

In order to have two comics I thought the site needed some changes, or else I would have to have two sites. I've never liked the navigation, but what I came up with is not that much better.

I uploaded the first set of changes, let's see how that works. The visible changes are:

• The homepage now shows two small thumbnail viewers, one per comic
• Comics are loaded on demand, which should speed up initial page loading
• Homepage no longer displays the latest comic, you have to click to see it

I still need to work on a better design. Well, at least I really need to change the arrows for left/right on the thumbnail viewers...

Anyway, feedback welcome as usual. I expect to be adding and testing stuff now that I have a nice setup for testing it.

When adding text that is narrated, I usually add a rectangular box and put it hanging around. It's not like a balloon but maybe I should do like everybody else and put the box on top of the panel when it's supposed to be read before whatever is happening in the panel.

Like in this example from the upcoming page:

Also, I might reduce the size of the drawings, I tend to do them too big. I'm hesitant though, because if you've got a nice big monitor they look much better. Maybe I should play with different resolutions.

Just a quick note to record how upgrading from Wordpress 2.x and Webcomic 2.x went for me. I waited quite a while until most people stopped complaining about upgrade problems before trying it.

First, I saved posts with the export tool (which doesn't give that much peace of mind because it doesn't include images). Then I did a full backup of the whole site and a dump of the mysql database. I do that regularly with a small script so that was easy.

After backing up everything I upgraded Wordpress. It had been asking for it for quite a while now, with a huge 'Upgrade to wordpress 3' button always visible in the Admin console. Instead of clicking that, I decided to go through Dreamhost's panel because there are some things that need to be setup at Apache level that I know people at Dreamhost had taken care of, so it seemed the safe bet. I also figured I could get some support if I went that way (which I didn't need btw).

The upgrade to Wordpress 3 went flawlessly. Well, flawlessly meaning in this case breaking most everything and rendering the site apparently ok but horribly broken inside. First, all comics had disappeared, which is a bit scary when your site is supposed to be mostly about that. But that was expected because neither Webcomic nor Inkblot (the theme) were upgraded yet. I upgraded Webcomic directly from the plugin directory and downloaded the latest Inkblot theme from their site. I extracted the inkblot theme into the themes directory and copied inkblot-child outside of it so that it sits directly under 'themes', I then made sure inkblot-child was selected as the current theme.

Then, I went to Webcomic/Tools and upgraded the posts. This essentially recovers all the comic posts by migrating them to the new format. It was a relief to see them reappear, as every comic post had been lost until this step. The process is easy and consists on a small wizard-like dialog with a few steps, and one of them implies you manually moving your comic files to another directory. After that, a few of the posts weren't correctly bound to their comic images so I just bound them again.

All the tweaking on my inkblot-child theme was lost, which was not a real problem as I prefer the new structure. I just uploaded a banner for the header, tweaked font size and type and played a bit with the list format.

I tested the design that I commented sometime ago, with a blueish/magenta background, but it seems to clash with white images. I'll try it again at some point.

So, in summary:

• Upgrading wordpress to 3.0 is easy
• Webcomic doesn't upgrade too easily (I moved from the latest 2.x to 3.04). I really think most people will end up with a broken site. Good news is that there's lots of support from the Webcomic guys, and a nice video illustrating the process.
• Inkblot may upgrade nicely but I really didn't even try, just started from scratch with the new version.